This invention relates to stranded wire strength members particularly but not exclusively such strength members used in submarine telecommunications cables.
Tensile strength member wires are used in many applications from simple wire ropes to more complicated stranded strength member layers in submarine cables such as that shown somewhat schematically in FIG. 1 of the accompanying drawings. When a wire tensile strength member is laid up into a cable element or a strength member layer of a cable element, it is the normal practice when a wire supply bobbin becomes exhausted to weld the end of the wire from the bobbin onto the beginning of the wire of the next bobbin and to continue manufacture from the second bobbin.
Where welds between butted ends of wires occur in a stranded wire strength member, the strength of the individual wire at the weld is not as great as the wire itself. Where these weld joints are randomly spread throughout a cable element, then this may not be of any great consequence, but where a stranded wire strength member is created from a plurality of wires of similar length from individual bobbins, then these bobbins tend to become exhausted at substantially the same place along the length of the cable being made.
It is an object of the present invention to minimise if not eliminate any weakness of a welded joint creating a tensile weakness in the strength member so formed.